Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

They came to a guarded door where carved warding eyes gave warning they were about to enter the halls of the first lineage. The guardsmen looked uncertain, but began to kneel. He stopped them with his hand and advanced on one whom he recognized as Naith, who grew tearful recognizing his Master’s son and kissed his hand.

The chambers beyond were warmed by light and a smell of home that brought tears to Carnelian’s eyes. When far from prying ears, Tain asked him, bluntly, why he had come now and with the black barbarians.

That reminded Carnelian. ‘Is the homunculus safe?’

‘The little man? Safe enough.’

Carnelian saw his brother wanted his question answered. ‘Difficult times are coming, Tain. I’ve a plan to save us all, but before I can speak of it, I must talk to Father.’

‘Of course, Carnie,’ Tain said, leaving Carnelian troubled by the trust in his brother’s face, but also more determined.

At last they reached immense white doors. Carnelian saw Keal among some guards, and rushed forward to catch him by the arms to stop him kneeling. He kissed him. ‘My brother.’

Keal blushed. ‘He’s expecting you,’ he whispered, as if he wished not to wake some invalid beyond the doors. Carnelian eyed them with some faltering of his purpose. They looked so much like the doors of his father’s hall in the Hold. Of course, he realized, it was the other ones that were a copy. His child’s eyes had made those seem massive; these doors really were.

‘Keal, are we secure from any outside attack?’

‘We are, Master.’

There was a certain look in his brother’s face, the same in Tain’s, in that of the other guardsmen. All there were relating what was happening to what had happened on the island. Then the danger had come from Aurum and the other Masters arriving on their black ship. Though his people did not know it yet, the situation now was even more perilous.

Carnelian turned to Fern. ‘Please wait here.’

Fern looked unhappy, but nodded. Carnelian cleared his mind and turned to the doors. They were an ivory mosaic of chameleons whose eyes were rusty iron rivets. He struck one of the doors three times with the heel of his hand. As the doors opened, through the gap between them he saw a fire. Beyond it, sculpted by its light, the shape of a Master. For a moment Carnelian felt the weight of time falling from him. He was a boy again, coming to tell his father of the approach of a black ship.

‘Celestial.’

Carnelian hated his father greeting him thus. It was another barrier between them. As the old man removed his mask, his gaze alighted on him, before flicking away to take in the shadowy limits of the hall. Carnelian was sure he had seen in those grey eyes the love that his father found too difficult to express.

His father’s frown crumpled further his lined face. ‘You must find these palaces cold, unwelcoming, but as you surely know, Celestial, resources are at the moment restricted.’

He seemed very old, then. Coming alive again, he fixed Carnelian with his gaze. ‘If only you had sent us warning of your visit.’

Carnelian grew angry. ‘This is a lot more than a visit!’ The anger left him. His father looked so vulnerable, but he had to know the truth. ‘The legions have all been destroyed.’

His father’s bones seemed suddenly to soften. He collapsed into a chair that the silk slopes of his robe had concealed.

‘Father,’ Carnelian cried, moving forward, but then was stayed by his father flinging up his hand in a barrier gesture. ‘All?’

‘All.’

His father sagged. ‘Then it is over.’

Carnelian felt sick at heart with the need to help him, to touch him, to be touched by him. ‘It is I who have brought this thing to pass.’

His father raised his eyes as if trying to make him out at some vast distance. ‘You? Have you forgotten my warnings to you about the Chosen? How dangerous we are? It was only the Balance of the Powers that kept us caged. Without it, it was always fated we should fall upon each other like beasts. The Balance was the only thing keeping us from another internecine war that would lay the whole world waste.’

Carnelian was afraid that his father had lost his mind. ‘That war was fought and, seemingly, won, but now the world is destined to fall into famine and ruin.’

His father lifted a bony hand shaping a contemptuous sign of negation. ‘The Great will never submit to domination by the House of the Masks.’ His gaze fell raptor-like on Carnelian, who desperately wanted him to make sense. ‘You think you’ve seen a civil war, my Lord? You’ve seen nothing! If the Chosen are given the means to wage war upon each other, they will do so to the death.’ His father’s hand wavered in more negation. ‘The Balance, bought at the price of the previous war, is our only hope to maintain the harmony of the Commonwealth. It is we, all of us, who have conspired to shatter its mirror.’ His eyes dulled. ‘But perhaps it is foolish to hope that the Balance should stand for ever. Who can hope to build a rampart proof against the sea?’

Carnelian felt lost. He had so much counted on his father’s strength. The horror of what he had witnessed at the Gates piled onto that of the battlefield. It seemed as if he were succumbing to an avalanche of corpses. ‘I broke the Balance!’

His father regarded him with a frown of incomprehension. ‘Molochite…’

Carnelian was unable to dam the pouring out of a confession of his actions, of his influence on Osidian, of the influence on everything of his dreams and, as he did so, he was aware of his father’s face softening and, when his father put out his hands, he hesitated, but laid his own upon his father’s, whose thin fingers closed about them, tenderly. ‘Son, dreams are the chief way by which the gods communicate with men.’ He smiled. ‘Perhaps not “gods”, but those forces that move the world. Why did you follow your dreams?’

Carnelian frowned back tears, trying to find the words, eventually finding only one. ‘Compassion.’ A strange word; in Quya sounding almost shameful. His father smiled up at him, seeming suddenly very wise. ‘It was your heart that listened.’ He nodded, still smiling. ‘Then you have done only what was necessary.’

Carnelian gazed down at his father, something of whose former beauty shone out from his wasted face. ‘You say that, even though it has brought us all to ruin?’

The light went out in his father’s face. He let go Carnelian’s hands and folded his own together over his stomach as if nursing an ache. He gazed up, a strange, fearful expression in his eyes. ‘In truth, my first reaction to your news was relief.’

Carnelian stared at him.

‘It has lifted a burden from me. For a long, long time,’ he sighed the words, ‘I have thought of nothing but the succession here.’ He lifted his chin to take in the vast darkness round them. ‘Several times have you been taken from me. The last time, I knew the ruling of this House must pass to Opalid.’

‘But I sent you word to reassure you.’

His father smiled grimly. ‘The Maruli?’ And when Carnelian nodded, ‘It was not easy for me to believe you.’ He laughed, grimly. ‘How has it come to this: that I should find relief in the ending of the world?’ His eyes fell bright upon Carnelian. ‘You think me selfish?’

Carnelian did not know how to answer. It seemed so, but he too had a yearning to be free of the care of others.

His father’s head dropped and he seemed to be watching one of his hands as it crushed the knuckles of the other. ‘Whereas you have always followed your heart, I have striven to cut mine out.’ There was fury in his eyes as he glanced up. ‘As we teach and are taught to do.’ He looked away. ‘We face the world with our masks as proud and blind as the Sacred Wall. We raise these ramparts even between ourselves.’ He turned back to Carnelian, haunted. ‘Even on our island, far from Osrakum and the Law-that-must-be-obeyed, I told myself I must maintain this aloofness for your sake; for one day you must return here. Nevertheless, you know, to your cost, how poorly I prepared you to be Chosen.’ His face twisted as if he had something bitter in his mouth. ‘I lied to myself. It was for my own sake that I held onto my pride. In that remoteness, I was terrified I would cease to be Chosen.’ His eyes grew bright with tears. ‘You see, it became so difficult to believe that I was an angel. Even behind my mask, I was changing. I tried to blind myself to my degeneration by keeping before me always a vision of Osrakum and the manufactured hope and fantasy of return.’ He closed his eyes and breathed deep. ‘Powers and Essences forgive me, but when I saw in your face you were not of my blood, I seized on the danger to you as the excuse I needed not to return. In truth I did not want to return and we would not have, had the black ship not come.